Occasional Papers eBook

and impatience. There is nothing peculiar to the
English Church in the assumption, either that outsiders
should not meddle with and govern what she professes
to believe and teach, or that the proper and natural
persons to deal with theological questions are the
class set apart to teach and maintain her characteristic
belief. Whatever may ultimately become of these
assumptions, they unquestionably represent the ideas
which have been derived from the earliest and the
uniform practice of the Christian Church, and are held
by most even of the sects which have separated from
it. To any one who does not look upon the English
Church as simply a legally constituted department
of the State, like the army or navy or the department
of revenue, and believes it to have a basis and authority
of its own, antecedent to its rights by statute, there
cannot but be a great anomaly in an arrangement which,
when doctrinal questions are pushed to their final
issues, seems to deprive her of any voice or control
in the matters in which she is most interested, and
commits them to the decision, not merely of a lay,
but of a secular and not necessarily even Christian
court, where the feeling about them is not unlikely
to be that represented by the story, told by Mr. Joyce,
of the eminent lawyer who said of some theological
debate that he could only decide it “by tossing
up a coin of the realm.” The anomaly of
such a court can hardly be denied, both as a matter
of theory and—­supposing it to matter at
all what Church doctrine really is—­as illustrated
in some late results of its action. It is still
more provoking to observe, as Mr. Joyce brings out
in his historical sketch, that simple carelessness
and blundering have conspired with the evident tendency
of things to cripple and narrow the jurisdiction of
the Church in what seems to be her proper sphere.
The ecclesiastical appeals, before the Reformation,
were to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction alone.
They were given to the civil power by the Tudor legislation,
but to the civil power acting, if not by the obligation
of law, yet by usage and in fact, through ecclesiastical
organs and judges. Lastly, by a recent change,
of which its authors have admitted that they did not
contemplate the effect, these appeals are now to the
civil jurisdiction acting through purely civil courts.
It is an aggravation of this, when the change which
seems so formidable has become firmly established,
to be told that it was, after all, the result of accident
and inadvertence, and a “careless use of terms
in drafting an Act of Parliament”; and that difficult
and perilous theological questions have come, by “a
haphazard chance,” before a court which was
never meant to decide them. It cannot be doubted
that those who are most interested in the Church of
England feel deeply and strongly about keeping up
what they believe to be the soundness and purity of
her professed doctrine; and they think that, under
fair conditions, they have clear and firm ground for